Accessible. Approachable. Astonishing.

A slim serrated blade of panic
penetrates your rind and bacon body
as the bookshop café table tilts
beneath your elbow and your plate
and lunch and cappuccino
are about to slide and smash
in front of all these well-bred readers.

You gasp and grasp but nothing’s moving
only you and this small moment
has not started a calamity.
Yet some calamities are started
by one lurch of failure: when a corkscrew,
exiting a cork askew, impales
a thumb, the bottle falls and breaks.

Once a skewer of alarm goes in
the flesh beneath your shirt gets seasoned
with salt and pepper specks of sweat.
Imagined rows of razor gazes
shave away the blushing layers
of your nerve-rich epidermis
into ragged flakes like Parmesan.

Passengers & CrewRMS Mongolia, Indian Ocean, June 1917

A music teacher and a theologian
were strolling quietly on deck
ten minutes into afternoon.
They were thinking about lunch
and landfall only hours away
when they felt the first explosion.

Three engineers, a quartermaster and a winchman
perished – with a boilermaker
caught up in the second blast
when furnaces and steam pipes split.
Also killed were some fourteen
native members of the crew.

A Parsee passenger was saved from utmost danger
and the parson-theologian
jammed his fingers as he clambered
in the lifeboat; but, by staying
self-possessed, the music teacher
salvaged all his valuables.

Unsafe House

I wake up feeling bruised by dreams.
Last night was full of clattering –
a pebbledash of hail
on windows. Sashes rattle still.
My rituals with match and gas disturb a battered kettle

whose mumble-whispering sounds like
soft wind made thicker by fine rain.
Coffee keeps its promise
better than most manifestos:
after me, the sewer rats will get their caffeine rush.